The University of Minnesota Center for Teaching and Learning contains many resources that can be adapted by teachers of upper middle school and high school students. A great one is a tutorial on active learning strategies.

Besides using the slides for your own professional development, you could use the slides to teach students to use active learning and to enable them to study your content.

How to use the tutorial

I’d probably present one strategy to students every second or third week. For the presentation, I’d show one example of a strategy applied to English language arts.

For example, the first slide about reflecting on experience with PowerPoint and finding a positive and negative example could easily be adapted to hundreds of informal ELA writing prompts, such as:

Take a moment to reflect on your experience with poetry. Come up with an example of a positive experience and a negative experience.

Take a moment to reflect on your experience with advertising. Come up with an example of an ad that you think works well one you think does not work well.

Take a moment to reflect on your reading about using commas. Come up with an example of a comma rule you think you understand well and and an example of a rule you don’t understand.

Rather than ask for oral responses, I’d use informal writing, which gets all students involved. I could present the strategy and have students write on any one of those prompts all in 10 minutes.

The rest of the first week I would use the same type of reflect-on-knowledge exercise for some aspect of that day’s work. That might take 2-3 minutes for informal writing. In a week, students would be able to use the strategy on demand.

Of course, the goal is to get students to use a strategy without prompting. That typically means forcing students to practice the strategy on material they select from options you set.

I might have students bring an “admit slip” each day for a week explaining how they used the reflect-on-experience strategy to help them activate knowledge prior to coming to my class.

The third week I might require an admit slip explaining how they used the strategy to help them activate knowledge for some other class.

Teaching this way gets students to apply the strategy enough times that they understand its value and limitations.